Recent advances in mobile wireless devices and telecommunications networks have permitted significant computing power to become available at the end user's device. With the proliferation of next generation smartphones and wireless PDAs, significant intelligence can be pushed out to the subscriber terminal. In addition, mobile data networks have been deployed around the world. These networks provide fast reliable packet data to subscriber's mobile devices. At the same time, intelligent mobile devices (smartphones) have emerged as capable computing platforms with considerable processing power, onboard storage and memory.
Smartphones are devices running feature rich operating systems such as Symbian, PalmOS, Microsoft WinCE, BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) and Java MIDP compliant devices. Due to the complex nature and multitude of new features, these smartphone devices are difficult to configure; compounded with limited keyboards, entering information such as personal details and configuration settings is not only difficult but also highly prone to human errors. A combination of feature complexity and configuration requirements has increased the difficulty of providing customer support for these types of devices.
With the wide availability of downloadable services and applications available for smartphone users, and the increasing costs of customer care, ensuring efficient and less-cumbersome support when problems arise is an increasing necessity. In contrast to traditional customer service applications that are available in contact centers today, CSRs (Customer Service Representatives) must undertake the extensive and time-consuming task of asking customer's complex questions pertaining to their wireless devices for problem diagnosis. This requires CSRs to be experts on smartphones and their applications, and also requires customers to spend an increasing amount of time on the telephone to receive support for their applications. The result is increased support costs, increased call handling times, complex diagnostic processes and overall frustration.
The current method of gathering and obtaining smartphone information required for diagnostics is manual and therefore complex, time consuming and prone to human errors. These methods leave both the subscribers and customer support staff frustrated. In addition, obtaining diagnostic information requires a specialized support staff and contact centers must therefore hire and train specialized staff for specific tasks. For the service provider the customer support process is increasing in complexity. Once device-specific profiles have been obtained from subscriber devices, inconsistencies are identified in the subscriber's configuration data in order to diagnose and resolve problems. The level of expertise required by the CSR to understand numerous smartphone devices and to search for up-to-date configuration data leads to increased costs in training, call-durations, and the overall operational costs. Thus a need currently exists for improvements in providing customer support that is more efficient and economical for the service provider and faster and simpler for the subscriber.